Computers and their peripherals such as printers, scanners and digital cameras have proliferated rapidly in recent years and so have networks such as LANs. There is also increasing need to share printers, modems and image readers over networks. Sharing peripherals such as printers and scanners over a network makes possible an environment in which a wide variety of devices can be used on a network.
When information concerning personal computers and peripherals is acquired and displayed, status information is acquired at the same time as resource information. As a consequence, acquiring the information takes time. In particular, since resource information for identifying such specifics as the type of a device and its capabilities often is much larger in quantity than status information that is for identifying the status of utilization of a device, acquiring the resource information is especially time consuming. For example, there are instances where, because of printer malfunction, the user wishes to acquire only information relating to the printer malfunction, and there are instances where the user wishes to enter an image and therefore desires only the latest status of scanner utilization (status information) concerning solely the scanners on a network in order to search for a scanner that is not presently in use. In such cases it is desirable to update only the particular device of interest and the desired information so that the user may acquire the necessary information more rapidly. However, the present state of the art is such that all available devices or all available items of information are acquired and presented to the user, as a result of which a great deal of time is needed to acquire the information that is desired. An attendant problem is that providing this information to the user places a heavy load upon the network.
Further, in a case where a shared peripheral has been connected locally to a personal computer on a network, the information acquired from this peripheral is of two kinds, namely first information held by the driver program running on the personal computer and second information held by the peripheral. If the second information of the peripheral is to be acquired, therefore, it is required that this be performed via the program of the personal computer to which the peripheral has been connected. As a consequence, acquiring this information takes longer than acquiring the first information.
Thus, the time needed to acquire information from a shared peripheral is long or short depending upon the information to be acquired. The problem which arises is that information cannot be acquired efficiently.